Major storage expansion to 2,2 TByte

So, downloading HD stuff from several torrents (post about best HD torrents will be available soon) filled up quickly my Half Terabyte server. So, I decided to switch frorm 4x160GB disks to 4x750GB setup, eg total 2,25 TB usable RAID5 storage.

RAID5 is essential in multy-disk setups, as single drive failure destroy's completely striped storage (RAID 0). Mirroring halves usable storage and is expeensive. So, RAID 5 is the winner. It is important to notice, that You may not want to use any entry-level RAID controller for RAID 5 as they use software parity calculation, overloeading CPU at large array writes. Instead usse HW accelerated version, for example RocketRAID 1810a.

My 2,2 TB media server in the nutshell

• Intel P4, 2GHz, 100MHz FSB
• 512 MB RAM
• PCI bus 32bit
• 40 Gb ATA disk for OS from integrated controller
• 4 x 750 SATA II 7200 RPM disks from Hitachi
• RAID5 controlled by HighPoint RocketRAID 1810a
• Intel Gigabit NIC
• Tower form factor (Dell Dimension 8200)

• Windows XP SP2
• TwonkyMedia 4,4 streaming server

My 2,2 TB RAID migration process:

• Installed temporary SATA controller and SATA drive 500GB for migration buffer;
• Tested old partition performance, using HD Tune 2.55 (free);
• Copied the contents from old RAID to single 500 GB SATA disk, attached to temporary SATA controller, using CodeSector TERACopy (took about 15 hours at average speed 6,5 MB/s)
• Tested the integrity of copy using TERACopy
• Took out 4 x 160 GB disks
• Installed fresh 4 x 750 GB Hitachi disks
• RAID 5 Zero build, using RocketRAID BIOS utility, block size 2048 (good for large sequential reads-writes as usual in video and audio media streaming), took 15 hours;
• Created parrtition and formatted it, usine windows storage admin tools from Control Panel;
• Copied all data back from single 500GB disk, using TERACopy;
• Tested integrity of the copy with TERACopy;
• Uninstalled temporary migration hard drive and controller;
• Tested partition speed, using HD Tune.

It took total to c3 full days to complete the job, far more than I expected Thanks to slow disk-to-disk copy -- probably due to slow 100MHz FSB. Copy speed to single disk was in average 6,5 MBps, restoring to new RAD happened at 10 MBps pace. My next server will be >1000 MHz FSB and PCI-x configuration. For streaming purposes old system is good, but copying is painfully slow.

After the break -- places to get HD content, Victoria Secret 2007 show in 1080 HD and more..